Google’s Play Store was first released five years ago today, on March 6th, 2012. To celebrate, Google released a roundup of the best-selling apps, games, movies, music, and books in the US since its launch.
If you’ve consumed any culture or downloaded an app in the last five years, the results probably won’t surprise you. The most installed apps are topped by a seemingly obvious list of popular social networks, and while top songs look like a complication of the biggest radio earworms from the last half-decade. Notably, many of the songs, albums, and movies are all recent releases, which speaks to both the popularity of that content and to increased Android growth (and therefore, Play Store usage) in recent years. It’s an interesting look back at how we consumed media as a whole over the past half-decade.
The full list of the top Play Store content is included below:
Top-installed games (does not count those preinstalled on Android devices)
Top-installed apps (does not count those preinstalled on Android devices)
Top-selling songs
- Ed Sheeran - “Thinking Out Loud”
- Lorde - “Royals”
- Taylor Swift - “Blank Space”
- Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars - “Uptown Funk”
- Pharrell Williams - “Happy”
Top-selling albums
- Adele - 25
- Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP2 (Deluxe)
- Taylor Swift - 1989
- Drake - If You're Reading This It's Too Late
- Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly
Top-selling movies
Top-selling books
- Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
- The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins
- A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn